As the most committed indoorsman west of Manhattan, I turned green not because I love to hug trees or bunnies (unless they're baked in mustard sauce). No, I turned green because, as schmaltzy as it sounds, I love to hug my kids.
-Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons

I'd like to think that if there was a target audience for Rod Dreher's crunchy con manifesto I'm a part of it. After all, I live in a rural county, I'm not predisposed to dismiss Luddism out of hand, and I've written favorably about the possibility of a conservative environmentalism. But, to be honest, I found this book to be astonishingly shallow and trivial. Here's the orony that resides at the core of Rod Dreher's argument: we live in an age when the consumer culture is so efficient and so comprehensive that it has turned anti-materialism into just another consumer good. After all, Mr. Dreher does not here advocate the kind of agrarianism that earlier conservatives did, nor even working a farm, the way Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers did. Instead, he wants to make a virtue of his own decision to live in a city but act as if he were on a farm--a charade that is, obviously, only made possible by the miracle of the modern free market. He hgave the gave away early, in one of his first National Review pieces on crunchy conservatism, -Crunchy Cons: Picking up organic vegetables in your National Review tote bag (Rod Dreher, September 30, 2002, National Review):

One day this summer, I told a colleague I had to leave early to pick up my weekly fresh vegetables from the organic food co-op to which my wife and I belong. "Ewgh, that's so lefty," she said.

It's all in the "up," isn't it? Sure, he wants to extol the sort of life wherein one would pick the vegetables, bu he wants to live the sort of life in which one picks up the vegetables that others have picked and brought to your local store. Oh, and then he wants to criticize the notions of shopping and stores. It's all quite silly.

Things only get worse when he tries to freight it all with meaning and explain his deeper purposes. He considers the organic food he buys to be a kind of sacrament, "At the risk of sounding pompously metaphysical, for people who adopt a sacramental way of being, everyday things, occurrences, and exchanges provide an opportunity to encounter ultimate reality--even, if you like, divinity." But what is a sacrament?:

Main Entry: sac·ra·ment
Pronunciation: 'sa-kr&-m&nt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English sacrement, sacrament, from Anglo-French & Late Latin; Anglo-French, from Late Latin sacramentum, from Latin, oath of allegiance, obligation, from sacrare to consecrate
1 a : a Christian rite (as baptism or the Eucharist) that is believed to have been ordained by Christ and that is held to be a means of divine grace or to be a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality

Now, when you go up for Communion, it's plain to see why the bread you eat is a symbol. We don't get to have a Last Supper with Christ every week. But, you could easily grow and pick your own corn and carrots and all the rest. A store bought loaf of whole grain bread isn't a symbol of bread; it's a sign that you don't much feel like baking yourself. There's no shame in that, but neither is there any need to inflate our natural laziness into some form of religious rite on the basis of how the guy we bought the produce from prepared it. If the life of a farmer in Red State America is preferable to that of a white collar worker in a Blue city--and there is a serous argument to be made in favor of that position--then go live the life for real, don't try and partake of it vicariously and pretend you have to pluck hayseeds from your hair each night. It's embarrassing.

Nearly 50 years ago, Whittaker Chambers famously "read" Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement. His most famous, though not really his most constructive, passage was his assertion that "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber go!'" Now, I'm no Whittaker Chambers, nor have I been granted the power to excommunicate anybody, but there are times where Rod Dreher is simply begging for the Rand treatment. And not just because from almost any page of Crunchy Cons, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To your local organic food co-op go!"